| Edition 30 | 6 October 2026 |
CT3’s AI protocol study (TR 29.832) lists three open-source agent protocols as candidates: MCP, A2A and ANP. It also lists a 3GPP-defined option. Meanwhile the IETF is deciding whether it wants the problem.
In 60 seconds
| Protocol | Origin | How the report characterises it |
|---|---|---|
| MCP | Anthropic, Nov 2024 | Stateless JSON-RPC 2.0 client-server; host/client/server roles; HTTP or stdio; OAuth authorisation. Lets models discover and invoke external capabilities |
| A2A | Google, Apr 2025 | Canonical data models for multi-agent collaboration; asynchronous tasks; polling, streaming or push; JSON-RPC, gRPC and REST bindings |
| ANP | W3C WebAgents, Feb 2025 | Decentralised; agent identity and discovery via DID; cross-domain end-to-end encrypted messaging |
| 3GPP protocols | — | Intent expressed as natural language, structured data or task descriptions. FFS |
The scope covers exposure, discovery, authorisation and invocation of AI capabilities, and 5G/6G interworking. Rapporteur: Apostolos Papageorgiou (Nokia Germany). Work item FS_6G_AIP_CT.
The CT3 article by Abdessamad El Moatamid, Xuefei Zhang (Huawei) and Zhenning Huang (China Mobile) lists the communication the protocol must support. This includes AI agents on UEs, UE-to-network agents, agents inside the network, third-party agents, and AI training and inference traffic. It sets out three paths: rely on IETF protocols, define custom 6G protocols, or combine existing open-source approaches. The article also names AGNTCY (Outshift/Cisco, LangChain, Galileo) as a fourth open-source effort.
The CATALIST BoF, chaired by Yingzhen Qu and Adrian Farrel, was minuted as not a WG forming BoF
. Its poll was 100 yes, 43 no, 11 no opinion. According to the minutes, Lionel Morand (Huawei) said: Protocol aspect study will finish in September 2027. 3GPP will not develop any protocol solution.
That is one delegate’s statement, not a 3GPP decision. It is consistent with the path of reusing external protocols.
Still open
No key issue or solution is written in TR 29.832. SA#113 also left the role of AI agents in connectivity unresolved, and 17 operators want essential connectivity not to depend on agents.
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Sources
Report contents are read from FriendlySpec renders of the draft TRs. Drafts change at every meeting; nothing in a draft TR is agreed until its conclusions are. Disclosure: MCP was created by Anthropic, and this newsletter is produced with Claude, an Anthropic model.